


paths diverging (are sure to cross again)

by CorvidFeathers



Category: Age of Ultron - Fandom, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Fix-It, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Plotty, Post-Canon, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-06
Updated: 2015-06-30
Packaged: 2018-03-29 03:43:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3880981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorvidFeathers/pseuds/CorvidFeathers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The events that destroyed their home country separated the Maximoff twins forever, or so they thought.  With Wanda still reeling from her brother's death, Pietro awakes to find himself revived by the remnants of what was once SHIELD, for a purpose.<br/>While Wanda struggles to find her position within the ranks of the Avengers and bond with teammates still wary of her, Pietro is thrust into an unfamiliar world of espionage and betrayal.  For the first time, the twins must face building a life without eachother, and find their way back home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. New

**Author's Note:**

> The Maximoff twins have grabbed my heart and ran with it, and I knew I had to write something to cement my denial of Pietro's death. That that something would be long and plotty was inevitable, and also at least half the fault of the wonderful timeless-deduction, who has helped me plot it out. I hope you enjoy! I'm a newbie to writing for the Marvel cinematic universe, so please don't hesitate to call me out on any mistakes.  
> All of the thanks to timeless-deduction, for plotting with me <3

The first word from Pietro’s lips when he woke was “Wanda?”

The world was a muddled blur of white and blue that seemed to burst into his senses when he opened his eyes, sending jolts of pain searing through his head.  Voices rose and fell on the periphery of his senses, but their words were nothing more than gibberish to him.  He could not move, even to turn his head towards the sound and a deep exhaustion pulled at the edges of his consciousness, pulling him back towards the yawning abyss.

 _Wanda_.  It was a struggle to form any sort of coherent thought, but the image of his sister burst into his mind without the slightest effort.  So many questions, so many half-remembered memories lurked below the tide of exhaustion that obscured his thoughts, but one memory made it to the surface.

Scared.  She had been scared.  Why?  Dimly, he could feel the sting of crumbled masonry and broken glass digging into his palms, tightness in his throat, a man’s low voice urging him on…  and knew on instinct that the memories were not his own, but a glimpse of what his sister had shown him.   Sharing her experiences with him had quickly become a second nature to him, and though he did not have the same telepathic abilities as her, he could feel her near constant presence in his mind, just as he could tell if she were standing behind him without turning to look.

But now the presence was… gone. 

“Wanda!” Pietro called.  It hurt to speak, it hurt to even draw enough breathe to form her name, but in his panic it doesn’t faze him.  “Wanda!”  He forced his eyes open again, trying to fight back against the awful blackness that had him trapped.  Finally, he was able to turn his head slightly, and to move his arms, only to find himself confined.  His fingers scrabbled at the smooth sides of something that felt too much like a coffin, and for a moment he could remember the bursts of heat and pain throughout his body and then the numbness and then _nothing_ , with Wanda’s scream following him into the abyss.

Suddenly there was a figure above him, silhouetted in white light, and a hand extended to his chest, pressing him back down.

“She’s safe,” the figure murmured. 

The words stilled him for a moment.  But what reasons did he have to believe that?  Pietro was going to demand answers, demand _proof_ , when something prickled against his arm and the darkness swallowed him whole again.

*             *             *

Time seemed to slow as the guns went off, their barrel aimed straight at Wanda.  Wanda’s hand flickered up , and a shield of crimson energy sprang up before her fingers to divert the shots just before the projectiles reached her.  The shots slammed into the wall beside her, and she allowed herself a smile, her shield fading out of existence.

The smile disappeared when the last projectile caught her in the ribs. 

The force against her lightly-armored body was enough to make her stumble backwards, and she held up a hand, the energy field sparking back to life before her.

It only lasted halfway through the next barrage.

When another projectile caught her in the shoulder, bursting to spread neon-pink paint over the scarlet of her coat, she snarled and sent a wave of crimson energy through the room, strong enough to knock her opponents off their feet.

“Not fair!” cried Sam, snatching up his paintball gun and scrambling back to his feet.  Despite his outcry, he was grinning, and she could sense nothing but amusement from him.  He never seemed to be discomfited by displays of her power, or anyone else’s for that matter.

“Nothing in a fight is fair,” Wanda said, trying in vain to wipe the paint from her coat, and sending a glance over at her other teammates, who were in various stages of picking themselves up off the floor.  Sam had been the farthest back, and gotten the least of the force of her push. 

“In a fight, your opponents would be using real bullets,” Romanoff said sharply, disentangling herself from one of the unfortunate former shield agents she had called in to participate in the exercise. Wanda didn’t sense amusement from either of them, and when she focused for a moment on Romanoff’s mind, her probe was met with flashes of red-hot anger and splinters of images. She had no time to delve further, as Romanoff jumped to her feet in one fluid movement, heedless of the knock she had just taken, and strode across the room towards her.  “This was supposed to be an exercise to build the strength of your shields, not an opportunity for you to show off.”

Wanda watched the rest of the former agents pick themselves up and retrieve their gear, and shook off a twinge of guilt as she read their emotions.  She had been the one to suggest she needed to work harder on using her powers to deflect fire; it was difficult to maintain cover for herself, or for civilians she was protecting, while still remaining on the offensive, and the drill had been to practice and expand her shields specifically, so she wouldn’t have to be distracted in a firefight again.

She would never admit it, but for a moment, she had panicked.  There had been something in the way the paintball had struck her that had triggered a memory that wasn’t her own, an iron-hot flash of pain throughout her whole body, followed by another and another and another until she had barely enough strength to speak and then not even that.  The last feelings she had sensed, _felt_ , from her twin before that connection had been severed forever.   She seemed to spend half her time trying to bury it, and half reminding herself of it, counting the moments that led up to that one and trying desperately to remember everything to fill the jagged hole torn into her existence.

So she had struck out blindly. 

If she were honest with herself, it was only sheer luck that the telekinetic blow had not been stronger.

It was something that Romanoff seemed to know; Wanda could sense something, underneath the more prominently projected feeling of aggravation that pulsed from the Widow’s mind: fear.  It was not the suspicious kind that Wanda frequently read from Romanoff’s thoughts of her, but something blunter and more primal.

Romanoff’s discipline rivaled that of even the most hardened soldiers Wanda had met during her time in Strucker’s custody, and her fear was buried deep, but after constant close proximity to her Wanda could sense is with only a few moment’s concentration. 

Wanda realized that Romanoff had been speaking, and in her focus on the spy’s mind, she had completely missed the words coming from her mouth.

“What was that?” Wanda said, rubbing her shoulder and shaking her head, as if shaking free weariness.  For all the power her awakening had granted her, it had made perceiving the world as she once had impossible.  How could she be expected to focus on words, when she could read the thoughts themselves?

She hazarded a glance at Romanoff’s face.   Those piercing eyes met her gaze and held it, cold and deadly.  Wanda knew everything she was feeling; and Romanoff knew she knew.  “If you want to be an Avenger, you’re going to have to stop acting like a child.  You have to learn _discipline_.”  The Widow’s words were harsh and cold, and Wanda did not dare reach out to the tangle of emotions beneath them.

“Now, Natasha,” Sam said.  He had come closer to them when Wanda wasn’t paying attention, and now stood behind the Black Widow.  For a moment it looked like he would put a hand on her shoulder, but he restrained himself.  “Aren’t you being hard on the kid?”

 _I’m not a kid,_ Wanda thought, at the same time Natasha spun on the Falcon and snapped “She’s not a kid.  She’s only acting like one.”

Sam blinked, but remained where he was standing.  “However old she is…  mistakes are understandable.  She’s not like… us.  She doesn’t have the same experience.”  Their eyes met, and something intangible passed between them.  Even Wanda’s senses failed to catch the nuances, but it was something powerful, something born of friendship and… trust. 

The ache of loss that crashed over Wanda was so sudden and unexpected that she had to turn away from the pair, so they wouldn’t see how glassy her eyes had become. 

She missed that trust, more than anything in the world.

For so long, she and Pietro had been alone.  There had been friends, in their days of desperate protests, and in the hazy days of their childhood, but companionship with others had been stripped away from them by degrees; first their parents, their whole family along with most of the rest of their immediate community.  Then their friends, when they had been taken in by Strucker’s claims, and those who had gone with them…  As far as Wanda knew, she and Pietro had been the only ones who survived the awakening.

Then they had been truly along, locked away and isolated and hoarded as a secret weapon for an organization that was just the bad as the ones they sought to fight against.  But they had been together, and in the end that was all that had mattered.

And now she was alone. 

Dimly, she could hear Romanoff exchanging a few quiet words with Sam, and then her tone turning businesslike as she said “I have just been informed I have an appointment to keep,” and her footsteps faded away down the hall. 

Wanda stared at the far wall, trying to will away the tears in her eyes.  She was happy- goddammit she was _happy_ here, even if the Widow didn’t trust her, even if she was still an outsider in so many ways, even if… even if she would never experience the sort of bond she once had had again.  She didn’t want to experience it again.  But that didn’t mean she couldn’t be happy here. 

She had a cause, and for the first time she had the resources to actually _help_ people.  And here she was, staring at the wall and trying not to cry.

*             *             *

When Pietro awoke again, he was sitting in a chair.

Well, _sitting_ implied a participatory relationship.  He was bound to a chair with a thin, strong metal chain that linked to cuffs on his hands and feet.  The room was well-lit and unusually clean compared to the hellholes they usually kept him in, as per Strucker’s standards. 

Everything ached.  It felt as if he had taken on a whole army, all by himself.   Without his powers.  But it was not just physical pain.  Everything felt… off, slightly, as if something or somethings were missing.  His head ached.

“Welcome back to the world of the living,” an unfamiliar voice said, and his head shot up.

A redheaded woman was sitting in a chair a few feet from him.  She was immaculate, and looked completely at home in the stark white of the walls and the floors; and yet there was something dangerous about her.  She did not so much sit in the chair as she _lounged_ , like a lioness surveying her territory.  Or her prey.

“Who… who are you?” he said, and then realized that he had spoken automatically in his native tongue, when she had addressed him in English. 

He clamored for the words, but his head felt heavy and his thoughts too thick to move so quickly.  Before he could find the words, she addressed him in the same, speaking Sovokian with only a tinge of some other accent.  “You do not remember me?”

Russian, he thought absently.  “No.  Are you one of Strucker’s?”

The perturbed the woman; she stiffened, and almost stood up.  “I’m not.  Strucker is dead.  Do you not remember?”

 _Strucker is dead._   The words that would have once been so monumental to him rang hollow, familiar.  As if he had heard them before…

And then everything came back to him in a rush.  The attack on Strucker’s base, the chance he and Wanda had seized to escape.  The robot, the sentience, Ultron, and his plan to tear apart Tony Stark and all the Avengers that stood in the way of the world.  Fighting.  Winning, losing.  Wanda looking in to Ultron’s mind, and that frantic flight…

Sokovia being propelled into the air.

Wanda, crouching in the ruins of a house, tears dripping down her face.  Wanda, standing defiant against legions of the creatures all controlled by that one mind, Wanda…

Pietro cursed himself.  How could it have taken him so long to realize what was wrong?  After all that time with Wanda a constant presence in his mind, with her companionship and reassurance accompanying his thoughts of moment of the day… how had he not realized she was gone?

“My sister,” he choked to the woman.  He must have gone white, because she leaned forward, her eyes showing the faintest glimmers of alarm.  He recognized her now; the Black Widow, Natasha Romanoff.  An Avenger.  He had fought her in the Klaue’s bunker, but though last he remembered the rest of the team hadn’t even know whether she was alive, she and him were, ostensibly, on the same side now.

“She’s safe,” she said quickly.  The words rang sincere… but he could remember her reputation now, who she was. 

“Why can’t I feel her?” he growled, yanking his arm against the chain that held him, just for an outlet.  Bound like this, he could not move with the speed his awakening had granted him, not if he wanted to avoid hurting himself.  He had learned that lesson all too well confined in Strucker’s cells.

Still, all the energy was simmering inside of him, seeking a release.  The cell was claustrophobic, and he wanted to be out, to _run_.

“Because you have been separated,” the Widow said calmly, sitting back in her chair.  “Your sister thinks you're dead.”  A grim smile turned up the corners of her mouth.  “You were.”

“Dead?”

Sokovia, his home, destroyed.  Thousands of people screaming as he had rushed to get them to safety, don’t think, just keep moving, keep going, as the world slowed around him and all that there was was him and death, and his own feeble efforts to snatch a few more innocent people from its clutches.

The archer, Barton, crouching over a child, shielding him from the gunfire that would burst forth from the advancing enemy.  The moment had slowed, as it only could for Pietro, and then he had made a choice and…

And there was nothing.  A yawning gap in his memory.

“I was… dead?”

“For the better part of half an hour,” the Black Widow was still smiling that grim smile, but there was something akin to compassion in her eyes.  “Don’t think too much of it.  Almost all of us have been there at some point.” 

He stared at her, his mind still catching on the thought.  Dead.  “How…”

“Helen Cho,” the Widow said, anticipating her question.  “After having her device put to the test and proven, even under such circumstances, she was eager to put it through a test of another kind.”

The words registered only vaguely to Pietro as concepts and people he remembered.  He closed his eyes.  Had he really been… dead?  He couldn’t remember it, couldn’t remember even being shot… just the intention that he had, the moment he had realized what saving that pair of lives would cost.

“Barton and… the child?” he said hoarsely.

“Unharmed,” the Black Widow said, her voice softening a few degrees.  “You… did a noble thing, Maximoff.  If Clint had…  I… I appreciate it.”  She straightened herself, and her voice grew colder again.  “But one noble deed doesn’t buy you all my trust, and I didn’t have you revived on the basis of that.”

He blinked, still having trouble comprehending all of… this.

“Why, then?“

"I have a job for you.”


	2. Vanish

Pietro was buried on the outskirts of what was left of Sovokia.

His grave was tucked in among a jumble of other new headstones, in the a small plot of land at the edge of the surrounding forest, clearly freshly turned into a graveyard for the victims of the disaster. 

It was small, unbelievably small given the scale of the destruction.  Wanda could be grateful for that, for the miracle that they had been able to save so many.

But she could only stare at slab of stone that marked her brother’s grave.

It was set a little apart from the others, whether by conscious choice or chance; it was at the very edge of the clearing, where underbrush was still creeping across the soil.  She had had no part in Pietro’s burial.  The memories of the days following his death were blurred, pale images that barely registered against the sound of those shots, the moment when Pietro’s heart stopped beating, the wild power that had torn through her and taken all of her pain, all of her _being_ for just a few moments. 

She had been locked up again, for a time; there had been a dispute about that, and about the fitting punishment for her crimes.  Flashes of anger and bitterness, ripples of empathy vibrating through to her, where she had been curled in her cell, trying to shut out her abilities, trying to escape the emptiness closest to her and the all-encompassing sorrow of all of the Sovokians.

By the time the decision was reached to allow her to join, a month had passed, and Pietro was long since buried.

Wanda hadn’t ever even seen his body.  She didn’t want to.  She didn’t need to, when she had known the instant that his presence had disappeared from the world, had felt all of his pain and fear and triumph as her own. 

She had died.

Now it sometimes felt as if she were stuck in limbo, a spirit trapped between the fact of a continued existence, and a death that should have been hers as well.  She woke every morning expecting to Pietro to be beside her, reaching out as had become her habit, only to find that she was alone.

She could deal with it now, without falling to pieces.  But it all still felt so… wrong.  Wanda threw everything she could into her training, longing for the day when she would finally be trusted to handle herself out of missions, but it all felt… surreal, somehow.

Wanda had hoped seeing his grave might change that, might at least ground her.

But looking at the nondescript tombstone, she felt… nothing. 

Pietro had been her other half.  She had known him, inside and out, as perfectly as one person could know another- even more so.  Than shouldn’t she be able to sense something, _feel_ something?  Something of his presence in the earth below her feet, something that could tell her that he was dead and she was alive and that was the way life would continue, or else give her brother back, and not force her through the agony of waking each morning to remember everything all over again?

There was nothing she could reach out to, nothing she could say to bring closure or lessen the pain.  No prayers came to her lips, nothing from the traditions of her childhood when the world had been neat and bright and safe.  Nothing from all the brutality she had lived through since.  The only thing that had truly brought her peace after peace had been torn from them had been Pietro.

Wanda crumpled to her knees.

The earth beneath her was cool to the touch, and little flowers were beginning to creep from the edges of the underbrush to the base of the gravestone. 

They had been joined by a few larger flowers, wilted now, but... deliberately cut and left there on her brother’s grave. 

The sight was so egregious her thoughts ground to a halt and she stared.  Who had left them there?  Who else would have reason to mourn her brother?

 For so long it had been just Wanda and Pietro against the world. 

But…  But Pietro had saved so many people. 

All they had ever wanted to do was help their people.

All he had ever wanted to do was save their people.

It was that handful of wilted flowers that finally broke her.

Her brother had a martyr’s grave.

She was sniffling and bleary-eyed, but over the worst of her tears when she heard footsteps rustling through the grass towards her.  Reaching out with her mind, she brushed against the edges of a consciousness fast becoming familiar to her, just tasting a little of the boundless compassion there, before retreating again.

Clint didn’t like people rifling around in his mind, and she was doing her best to respect that.

“Hey,” he said.  There was a rustle of clothing, and then a hand touched her shoulder, tentatively.   “Sorry to disturb you, but there’s a bit of a crowd inbound.  I thought that maybe we should go.”  He held out a hand to help her to her feet.

Wanda hesitated a moment, then accepted the help, climbing to her feet.  She should have noticed the approaching people herself; now that she was focused, she didn’t even have to reach out to feel oppressive tide of sorrow that rolled off of the collection of approaching presences.  With a moment’s effort, she could go deeper, finding the turmoil of individual emotions under the aura of the group. 

Her moment of concentration was broken when Clint jerked his hand away from her.  The flare of anger from him was strong enough for her to sense even with her conscious effort to restrain her abilities.

“I told you, I don’t like people poking in my head,” he said, in a tone that was controlled, but firm.  She didn’t miss the way his hands had twitched, for a moment going for the bow he wasn’t carrying.

She looked away from him.  It was too easy to forget others could read exactly when she was using her abilities.  “I wasn’t-“

A second’s notice was all she got: a surge of hatred and bitter triumph, from the one of the figures standing among the gravestones.  Just as she was turning to find the source, the world exploded around them.

The months of training at the hands of Natasha Romanoff and the other Avengers had paid off.  Without consciously thinking about it, Wanda’s hand flickered out in the customary sign, rearranging the circumstances of the world to create a barrier of energy to shield herself and Clint from the worst of the blast.  Enough force got through to send them staggering backwards, but the barrier shielded them from the worst of the force and heat.

Wanda’s heart was thudding in her chest, and her mind was flickering with the echoes of the explosions of years past, but she managed to maintain the shield and call up a blast of scarlet energy to her free hand, a second after Clint pulled a handgun from his coat.  They stood there a moment in the sudden stillness, squinting through the smoke.

People were screaming.   One person was sobbing, a high, undulating sound of pure despair that sent a shiver of anger through Wanda.  What sort of monster would attack her people now, after they had suffered so much?

An armored figure strode through the smoke, and for a moment Wanda froze, thinking she must be stuck in a nightmare.

The armaments that had been used to bombard Sovokia, that had taken the lives of her parents and thousands of others, had been invented and sold by Stark Enterprises long before Tony Stark had built his signature suit.  But that suit had quickly come to stand for everything that had destroyed Wanda and her country; the glimpses of it and the murderer who wore it speaking of peace on television, the arrogant interference of the Avengers in situations they knew nothing about, the name of the man who had almost killed her and Pietro on the lips of every other person in the country every week.  The cold gaze of that iron suit on the surveillance camera’s of Strucker’s base.

Another look told Wanda that this metal suit was not the work of Tony Stark; it was ill-formed, wth bulky, stiff-looking joints that rasped as it moved towards her.  The eyeholes were irregular, and the skull-like faceplate was dented.

Nothing more than shoddy imitations; but the burst of confidence that thought gave her was mitigated when the armored figure raised its hand and let loose and energy blast that she barely managed to intercept with a shield.  The energy was diverted and spun off into the graves around her, sending chips of granite and rock spinning through the air.

The next blast from the suited person proved just as useless, and the burst of disruptive scarlet energy she sent back sparked through the plates of the figure’s armor, followed by the discordanant sound of electrical systems failing.   But the small smile beginning to form on Wanda’s lips dropped right off of it when another armored figure stepped up beside the failing first, and then another.  And another.

“How many on your side?” she called to Clint, throwing up another shield as the new trio of shoddily-armored people opened fire on her, with bullets this time.  It seemed only the first had been equipped with weaponry similar to Stark’s.

“Five, give or take,” came Clint’s reply, snarled through gritted teeth.  “We’ve got to get those civilians out of here.”   The screaming ad begun to die down, but Wanda could see the forms of the crowd through the smoke, crouching close to the ground to avoid the gunfire… or lying on it, dead. 

The citizens of Sovokia were accustomed to situations like these.

“Go, get them out of here,” Wanda called.  “I’ll shield you.”

Her order had been given on impulse; when she and Pietro had fought as a team, she had usually called the shots.

Neither her nor Clint were even officially Avengers at that moment; Clint was still on his paternity leave following the birth of his son, and he had escorted Wanda to Sovokia only as a favor to her, and because he was… conntected to her brother too, in a way.  Wanda was… an Avenger in training, at best, and if she fell into the hierarchy in any way it was certainly below the rank Clint held. 

But he took the suggestion without argument.

Wanda focused her power, drawing on the depths within herself she still had yet to explore, and striking out with carefully-summoned, rapid burst of power, enough to draw all of the armored attacker’s attentions onto her while Clint sprinted to the first huddle of people.  She stepped backwards, maneuvering herself to be standing between Clint and the armored figures, so the barrier she created would protect both herself and Clint and those he was guiding; she couldn’t concentrate well enough to maintain more than one barrier at a time.  Even that was a strain to do, as she lashed out with more and  more telekinetic bursts.

Three of the armored figures were down, their suits disabled or… worse.   Wanda couldn’t control precisely what her powers did when she struck out with them; what control she had with the positioning of her fingers and hands was more general and directional.  Sometimes the scarlet energy would run through the suits, shorting out their workings, and sometimes they would merely push them back, sometimes they would eat into the metal itself…   Wanda’s powers were strange, even to her.  There was so much she had yet to figure out.

But now was not the time for that.

*             *             *

Pietro’s entire attention was fixed on the screen; he was leaning forward in his chair, and his knuckles were white with the strain of keeping himself anchored to it, anchored in place. The newscaster was narrating in breathless Korean; with his limited grasp on the language he could only pick up a word or two, but what he did understand told him he likely had a better grasp if what was going on in the footage.

The image was a blurred confusion of flames and smoke, but his eyes were fixed on a little, black-clad form that danced blithely within the chaos.

She was in Sovokia; he didn’t need the newscaster ‘s exposition to tell him that. Just a glimpse of the skyline was enough.

At Wanda’s side was… Barton, the man he had saved when… Shortly before being brought to Helen’s lab. He was in civilian clothes, like Wanda, and was without his bow, carrying only a small sidearm. They had been caught unaware.

The audio was distorted with distance and transfer from network to network, but Pietto could hear the screaming in the background. Voices calling out in his native tongue, screaming for help.

Over the footage , the Korean newscaster kept saying 'terrorist’. But these sorts of things were commonplace in Sovokia, had always been commonplace, from the time Pietro and Wanda had been little. They seldom attracted attention from the world press .

Now Ultron had yanked the remains of Sovokia straight into the collective consciousness of the First World, and it looked like it was going to stay in the position for a long time yet.

He finally got a glimpse of one of the metal-clad attackers, as Wanda flicked her hand out and a burst if scarlet energy cut through the smoke, and across the skull-like face of the thing attacking her.

For a moment Pietro thought it was one of Ultron’s metal monstrosities, but when he finely recognized the crude metal shape for what it was, it was almost worse.

He had spent enough time dealing with the inventions of Tony Stark long enough to know that the ill-formed, dented approximation of the Iron Man suit was no work of his. Such an ugly, inefficient creation wouldn’t suit Stark’s narcissism or his cruelty.

Pietro watched the fight, hardly daring to breathe as his sister barely evaded death.  It had been so long since he had seen her- a handful of months, but it was an eternity when they had scarcely been apart since they were born.  She looked… different.  Less haunted, and more… in control.  Their captivity, their awakening had been hard for him, but for everything he had endured he knew Wanda had it worse.  Her power was so much stranger, so much harder for her define, let alone control.

But she looked… confident.  Happy, even, smiling amidst the wreckage as each burst of her power spread chaos among the metal-clad forms.

He should have been there with her, fighting, helping her, instead of being locked up in another lab, useless.  Each instant his sister could die, and there was nothing he could do, nothing, nothing.

The room was too small and he felt as if every molecule of his body was vibrating with the urge to break free, the run, to run until he was back where he belonged.  But he couldn’t break free- he had tried already, once or twice- and he couldn’t tear his eyes from the image on the screen.  If he looked away, even for an instant, one of the bullets might meet its mark…  Wanda was just as fragile as any unenhanced human.  One would be enough.

Behind dim red glow of Wanda’s energy field, he could see the shape of Barton, shepherding civilians out of the line of fire and back into the relative safety of the trees.  He had just dragged a girl and a young child to their feet when Pietro caught a glimpse of a flash of silver behind them; another pair of counterfeit iron men.

He cried out a pointless warning, and at the same instant, Wanda turned.  She had no hope of reaching the trio in time, and her line of fire was blocked by the civilians guarded by her shield.  The quality of the video was too low for Pietro to see the expression on her face, but he could imagine it all too well- the agony of realization.

It jolted something in him.  That last memory he had, before…

On the screen, Wanda vanished.

*             *             *

For an instant, Wanda was not standing in the graveyard.

The universe was vast and she was just one small part; but connections flowed through it all, and she could feel the minds of them all, interconnected, a vast web of possibilities upon possibilities upon possibilities stretching out so far beyond her comprehension that she couldn’t even focus on it. 

Uncountable possibilities, uncountable minds, most barely aware of the connection that they all shared.

One very much awake.  And focused on her.

Then she was in the graveyard again, standing between Clint and the badly-armored attackers.  Instinctively, she threw the sphere of power she had been gathering to knock the two back.  How had she gotten there, across the graveyard in an instant?  It wasn’t a question she could ponder now, as Clint got the woman and child clear, out into the woods, and Wanda finished off the second armored figure with another burst of her power.

She was weakening—but so were they.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for the kudos and comments on the first chapter <333 Every one makes my day! Sorry it took me a bit to get this chapter done.  
> Aside from the added mental abilities, it seems like Wanda's powers in the movie could easily be similar to her set in the comics, just with inexperience and lack of guidance limiting the scope and how she thinks of them. That's something I want to explore here.


	3. Contain

Wanda was winning. 

Her world had been reduced to the metallic screech of metal and the rhythm of the power pulsing through her veins.  With each gesture, with each vector of energy that flew from her fingers, she could feel that pulse more keenly, as it wreaked havoc on the metal-suited soldiers.  On some level she knew she was exhausted; just remaining upright was a struggle, but her fragile form was bolstered by the energy that surged through her.  Every flash of power spread chaos across the smoky graveyard, and each only seemed to strengthen the power inside of her, until her entire body was humming with it and she didn’t think she could stop it if she tried, but she didn’t want to stop, she never wanted to stop.

The waves of ripples rolling off her opponents grew stronger and stronger, until they stopped even trying to harm her with the pathetic blasts of their malfunctioning power cores and began to break ranks and run.  She reveled in the wild terror that she inspired, reveled in the _power_.

Until the closest of the downed attackers’ suits began to beep quietly, and those running away suddenly froze, toppling to the ground as their suits too began to make a low whining noise.   A red light blinked on their chest plates.

It was pure intuition that saved Wanda; half-forgotten recollections of bombs crashing in the streets, hours spent staring at newsfootage of carnage and trying to put into context all that had happened to her.

Her hands seemed to move with a will of their own, fingers forming a pattern so complex that she would have been hard-pressed to remember it with anything but muscle memory.  The power inside of her surged.  For a moment she thought it might break free of the fragile conduit of her body, and burn her out, but instead it obeyed her desperate command and convalesced around the iron forms.

A moment later the explosives built into the suits detonated.

The explosions, confined within the prisons of her energy fields, turned inwards, utterly destroying the metal suits and those inside of them.  When the scarlet force fields fell away, little was left but charred fragments of bone and metal.

Wanda felt the backlash of the detonation through her power.  It was just a tiny fraction of the force she had contained, but enough to send her reeling backwards.  She fell too her knees in the devastated graveyard, trying to reign in her overextended power.  It was still rolling through her, crimson aftershocks of energy travelling from her hands and diffusing down into the dirt, rusting metal and crumbling rocks into dust.

She was so tired.  So tired.  The press of others’ emotions crashed down on her, the terror of the Sovokians crouched in the woods, the pain of those she had not protected, the desperate agony and euphoria of those whose lives were slipping away…

If she gave in to the chaotic energy within her, she would not have to worry about that.  She was small and mortal and in pain; but the force contained within her was something greater, something that sang through her blood, demanded to be set free to bring the glory of entropy into the world.

Her arms trembled.

_Breathe_ , Pietro had always said, when she had felt that she could not maintain control a moment longer, when she had been terrified and overwhelmed and a moment away from losing herself.

One breath, and then the next.  Then the next.  Then the next. 

Slowly, the scarlet halo in her eyes faded, and the energy streaming from her hands died away. 

Something within her closed.

The next few minutes were a blur; staring eyes, voices hushed in awe, until Clint’s irreverent call forced them away from her; someone wrapping a coat around her; the chips of gravestones underneath her fingers, letters of names so fragmented there could be no hope of piecing them back together; strong arms picking her up and cradling her, in a way that felt both alien and achingly familiar.

And then, Wanda slept.

*             *             *

The confines of the room were suffocating Pietro.

It felt like the walls were closing in on him, felt like there was a metal band wrapped around his chest, pulling it tight until he couldn’t breathe. 

Still, he remained in motion. 

Running was the only thing that brought him any measure of calm, even if it only took him a fraction of a second to get from one end of the room to the other, even if it made the time creep by that much slower, as his perception of the world sharpened to match his pace.  He was moving, so he wasn’t completely trapped.

The television was still on, and fragments of phrases in Korean floated in and out of his perception as he paced.  The news broadcast had cut away in the middle of Wanda’s fight, a local government announcement taking precedence over a foreign curiosity, even a violent one.  He had almost torn the monitor from the wall in a fit of pique; only the hope that the station might return to the shaky footage of his sister restrained him.

The clock told him it had only been ten minutes since the station had changed topics.  It felt like an eternity.

Surely he would feel it if Wanda died.  Even with the connection Wanda had forged between their minds broken, he would feel it. She was too much a part of him. 

For the first time, he was acutely aware of how one-sided that connection had been.  It had allowed their minds to meet in ways Pietro could never have imagined before; they hadn’t needed words, or even the concepts of words.  But it was Wanda who created it, Wanda whose powers fueled it, Wanda who could reach out to him in ways that he could never reciprocate. 

Never had he felt so useless, so weak, so _trapped_.

Another minutes ticked by.

His foot slipped, and he pitched forward, slamming into the wall.  His reflexes were fast enough that he managed to get his hands up between him and the wall at the last minutes, but at the speed he was going to collision was still violent. 

Something in his wrist crunched.  Pain flooded through him a moment later; enhanced response came with its own unique set of downsides.  The rush of his blood echoed through his ears, and the band tightened around his chest, and he couldn’t breathe it hurt he couldn’t breathe..

It took him back to the months trapped in cells, under the observation of Strucker’s scientists.  Trapped, trapped while every second felt like an eternity and every muscle in his body was singing with energy and he could feel his sister’s mind deteriorating in the cell next to his but he could not reach out to her, could not stay still long enough to even form a thought coherent enough to break through the barrage of thoughts already assaulting her.

Another handful of minutes passed as he lay there, feeling the torn muscles and cracked bones in his hand begin to reknit themselves.  His first experiences with the sensation had almost torn him from his senses, he remembered; the writhing, itching pain of tissue coming together and the dull, grating agony of bones healing were still alien to him. 

It would take a few days for the damage to be gone completely.  He could shrug off minor injuries, but Strucker’s extensive testing had discovered the limits of his enhanced healing quickly enough.

He was saved from wandering down that path by the quiet mechanical rasp of the door sliding open, and a pair of shiny heels stepping into the room. 

His eyes went from the heels up to meet the gaze of their owner. 

Helen regarded him with something between annoyance and mild concern.  “What have you-“

“You have to let me go,” Pietro said, rising unsteadily from his crumpled position.  “Wanda-“

“Is fine,” Helen cut in.  “I’ve just been in contact with Agent Romanov.  Your sister and Barton escaped the fight with nothing more than a few scratches.”  She held his gaze calmly, taking a step towards him and raising a hand.  “Calm yourself.”

Pietro’s pulse was still pounding in his ears, and his breaths came in gasps.  Now that he was standing again, and the worst of the pain from his collision had faded, the room seemed unbearably small once more.  He turned away from Helen, and began to pace.  “You can’t keep me here,” he said.  “Not- Not when Wanda is in trouble.  I’ve done everything you asked of me.  I’ve sat here doing _nothing_ for months, I’ve endured your tests, Romanov’s interrogations, and your employees poking and prodding at me like I’m an animal in a cage.”  His steps quickened, until he was just a blur of motion turning back and forth between the narrow confines of the walls.  “I’ve listened to everything your organization had to say, I’ve been compliant- but I cannot, I _will not_ sit here and do nothing while Wanda is in danger!”

Helen said nothing for a moment.  He could feel her eyes on him, even though he knew he was moving too quickly for her to get a good look at him.  She remained silent and still for a few more moments, waiting.

He slipped again, got careless judging the distance when turning, smacking his shoulder against the wall.  It was only a moment’s error, but it was enough for Helen to step forward and grab his arm.

Pietro could have torn himself away with minimal effort, but the contact was enough to jolt him out of the frenzy of movement he had fallen into.  Once he started it could be hard to stop, when he felt so trapped, when he had no other control.  A bad habit from the earliest days of his development in Strucker’s labs.

“Pietro,” Helen’s voice was calm, but there was an edge to her tone.  “Your sister is an Avenger.  She will be in danger, and you will not always be able to protect her, not anymore.” 

“Why not?” he demanded.  “You- the Black Widow- whoever decided to stick me into your machine wanted another Avenger, didn’t they?  Why aren’t I out there, with them?  With Wanda?”  Just a few months ago, the Avengers and their associates had just been a piece of everything wrong with his world, a facet of the forces that rolled into Sokovia periodically, used it for their owns interests, and abandoned it to the hands of the latest in a long parade of tyrants. 

But…  The fight on Sokovia had changed things.

Von Strucker had promised them the ability to change things for the better.  He had lied.  The realization had been creeping into Pietro for a long time before the Avengers’ attack on the base.  Strucker had never shown any intention of allowing them to pursue any just or noble cause, or try to bring any change to their country or the world.  They had been groomed to be his attack dogs.

Ultron given them much the same promises as Strucker, except as a partnership; no longer had they been powerless, or so they had thought.  Pietro would never forget the sheer exhilaration of being free, finally free, from Strucker’s cramped fortress and the slow realization that the man who had oversaw their transformation into something greater than human would sooner or later give them orders they could not go through on.

He had felt so powerful, facing down the Avengers with Ultron.  Facing down Stark.  Fighting for a better world.

But Ultron had turned out to be just another destructive force.

The Avengers were… different.

It had been the whir of the helicarrier evacuation ships that had started to shift his opinion.  In the midst of all the violence, all the chaos, SHIELD had saved his people.  In the midst of the violence that he and Wanda had a hand in creating, it was the Avengers who had set things right.

It didn’t erase the decades of wrong that had been done.

But it did mean something.

He wanted to make it mean something.  He wanted this to be his opportunity, their opportunity, to help.  Not on the whims of some destructive megalomaniac, not as tools to someone’s designs, but as individuals who could make a difference.  Together.  That had always been their dream.

But he was stuck in Helen Cho’s lab, being monitored and tested and occasionally grilled by the Black Widow. 

And Wanda was off being caught unprepared in Sokovia.

“A few months ago, you were legally dead for thirty minutes,” Helen Cho said, going to the cabinet near the far wall and taking out the case of medical supplies stored there.  “The fact that you are alive now and retain your cognitive function and the majority of your memories would be considered a miracle by most.”  The edges of her mouth turned upwards in a rare expression of pride.  “I did not throw my life’s work into your resuscitation to have you thrust into combat situations while still recovering, and the Avengers have enough faith in me to trust my judgment in keeping you under observation here for the time being.”  There was a brittle edge to her tone.  “Sit,” she said, gesturing at the sole chair in the room. 

For all of Pietro’s righteous anger, he sat.   

She took his injured hand in her own, and carefully surveyed the damage, first by her own sight, and then with a small handheld scanner she took from the case. 

She had had him under observation for months, but every time she examined the accelerated patterns of his healing, she got the same look of rapt fascination in her eyes.  As she looked down at the results of the scan, she murmured something absently to herself in quiet Korean, caught up for a moment.  Then she shook herself out of the reverie, and set the scanner aside, reaching for supplies to splint and bandage his wrist.

“You don’t need to-“ Pietro began, trying to pull his hand away, but Helen’s grip was as strong as iron and her glare was steely.

“Your healing is accelerated.  That doesn’t negate the risk of your body healing itself wrong,” she said. 

Then how have I survived so long? he thought, but for once bit his tongue and bore the discomfort as Helen straightened and splinted his wrist. 

He was just starting to sink back into his worries when an explosion wracked the building.

*             *             *

Natasha Romanov stepped out into the bright, cold morning, squinting against the sun that glared down through a thin canopy of clouds.  She had long gotten used to jumping from timezone to timezone, and a regular sleep schedule was not something that she ever had the luxury of maintaining, but after coming home from a particularly violent foray into Ireland to be greeted by a disaster in Sovokia, the cheery morning seemed especially an affront.

Her opinion on the morning was obviously shared by Steve Rogers, who was leaning against the railing of the balcony and staring down at the tablet in his hands with an expression that could have made the most hardened SHIELD agent quail.

“I just got off the phone with Clint,” she said, coming up beside him.  “He’s fine.  Wanda’s still asleep, but she’s not injured beyond a handful of bumps and bruises.  They’re going to lie low for a bit, until Wanda wakes up.”

Steve turned towards her.  “That’s good.  I want them back here as quickly as possible, though.  We can’t risk losing them.”  He tapped something on the tablet, and held it up for her to see.  The screen showed the shaky video of the fight that had been circling through television networks and the internet for the past few hours.  He paused it on, and zoomed in on the profile of one of the metal suits.  “It looks like these were modelled after Stark’s tech.”

“Cheap knock-offs,” Natasha said, taking the tablet from Steve.  “That’s what Clint called them.  They couldn’t fly, or their operators weren’t trained how to.  And they’re obviously much more fragile than anything made by Stark.”  She tapped play, and on the screen a pixelated Wanda Maximoff demolished the back of one of the suits with a burst of crimson energy.

“Self-detonating, too,” Steve mused.  “Even if they’re nothing more than knock-offs, it wouldn’t be easy to assemble the resources to produce them in Sovokia.  Or to design something so similar to Tony’s suit in the first place.”

“The last person who even came close had blueprints of Howard Stark’s designs,” Natasha said.  “For all Tony’s egotism, the man is gifted.  For anyone to get even this much closer to recreating his suit, they probably had help of some sort.”

“I’ve left a message for Tony,” Steve said.  “I’d hate to yank a man from his idyllic retirement, but…”

“Duty calls,” Natasha said with a smirk.  “I can’t imagine Stark is finding much fun in the quiet life.  Can you imagine him working on a farm?  Getting up to milk the cows each morning?”

“Not unless the cows presented some dangerous technological advancement, no,” Steve said.  “But regardless, this technology is his responsibility.  The last thing we need is more of it on the loose.”

 

 

 

 

 

Natasha nodded.  For a moment the two were silent, Natasha staring out at the sprawling campus that surrounded the main buildings of the base, and Steve staring down at the screen in his hands with that mournful look he only got when he was having some sort of internal struggle.

“What’s on your mind?” Natasha asked. 

Steve sighed.  For a moment she thought she would have to pry an elaboration out of him.  Then he spoke.

“The Maximoffs,” he said, still not looking at her.  “I hoped we had gotten rid of the need for deception when we tore SHIELD down.”

She looked over at him sharply.  “I… understand.  But Steve, there will always be a need for deception in a business like ours.”

“There shouldn’t be,” he said.  “I can’t help but thinking… they’re just a pair of kids, Natasha.  Kids who have been given powers beyond their understanding, and put into a world they could never be prepared for.”

Natasha was silent for a moment.  _Seeing parallels, Steve?_   “You know what Wanda is capable of,” she said quietly.  “All of that destruction Clint reported, all of that is _nothing_ compared what she can do to people’s minds.  You know as well as I.  She was a step away from tearing all of us apart, and we’re arguably the most dangerous people in the world.”

“We’re all capable of terrible things,” Steve said.

Nothing to deny there.  “We’ve never dealt with anyone like her before,” Natasha said.  “She’s young, she’s not fully aware of her own power, but she took on all of us.  Imagine what she will be able to do when she’s in full control of herself.”

Steve said nothing.

“Have you seen the recordings, from Strucker’s database?  Of the interrogations?” Natasha asked.  Ultron had scrambled the files when he had first invaded their systems, trying to obscure the abilities of his potential ally most likely.  But after his destruction, Tony, with the Vision’s help, had managed to salvage most of the data they had lost. 

“I have,” Steve said.  His jaw tightened, and he looked faintly sick. 

Natasha had seen a lot in her career.   But she knew the images from those grainy recordings would be with her for a long time. 

Interrogation was always brutal, whether it involved physical violence or not.  She had intimate knowledge of every sort of interrogation- or at least she thought she had, before she had watched Strucker’s recording. 

She had never seen a mind destroyed so thoroughly. 

Wanda’s reaction had been, in some ways, even worse to watch.  The girl was in over her head, a pallid shadow of a thing on the grainy type.

The way she had screamed…

“It scares me, Steve,” Natasha said.  The bitter admission felt leaden in her mouth.  “ _She_ scares me.  The way she got inside my head, the things…”  She cut herself off.  She had never told anyone what she had seen, not in so many words, and she didn’t think she ever would.  It was part of the person she had tried for so long to shut up, the Other Natasha who had never had any choices but death or survival.  “We need to be able to contain her, to teach her.  To set her on the right track.”

“Do we need to keep her brother from her?”

Natasha was quiet for a moment.  “They’ve been together their whole lives,” she said at last.  “I read HYDRA’s file on them.  Strucker was frustrated that he could not ever seem to reach them completely, could not use many of the standard techniques for brainwashing and manipulation, because their connection to each other was too strong.”

“You’re not suggesting-“

“No.  You know me better than that,” she said, with no real heat in the words; there hadn’t been any real note of accusation in Steve’s tone.  Nonetheless… her own experience with such techniques was personal enough that even when she had been at her most devoted to SHIELD, she never would have used them.  “It just goes to show how good they are at closing ranks and shutting the rest of the world away.  I doubt they have ever fully trusted anyone but each other in a long time.  If we want to be able to truly trust Wanda, if we want her to stay here as one of us… I think separating them, at least for a time, is the right strategy.”  She met Steve’s gaze. 

“And Pietro?”

“He’s different.  His abilities are straightforward, and he’s… demonstrated a degree of trustworthiness that even some of our best agents couldn’t hope to match,” Natasha said, smiling.  “He’ll be a lot of work, but I have plans for him.  Plans that will work better if no one knows he’s around.”

Steve nodded slowly.  They had spoken about it before.  “Alright.”

“Steve?”  Natasha met his gaze.  “All of this is only what I think is best.  If you think I’m making the wrong call, say so.”

Before he could say anything, both their phones dinged, with a sharp, high ringtone used only for emergencies.

Natasha had hers out first, and read the short, brusque text.  “Dr. Cho’s lab is under attack.”


	4. Fracture

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay! I was away from my computer and didn't have the time to write for a while, and then when I sat down to write this it kept getting longer and longer. I finally decided to put some of what I planned for this chapter into the next chapter instead because it was just getting too long.  
> Thanks again and always to the wonderful timeless-deduction for betaing and being awesome <3

“What the hell was that?” Pietro demanded, turning to Helen.

She shook her head, as the alarms began to blare through the facility.  “Not again,” she said.  Her eyes were fixed on the door, and there was a glassy quality to her stare. 

“Doctor Cho,” Pietro said, reaching out and grabbing her by the shoulder.  A shudder ran through Helen’s body, and she bit back what sounded like a sob.  He could feel her trembling.

He had seen that same haunted look in Wanda’s eyes, in his own reflection, in the years following the bombing.  At first it had been any loud noise that had triggered it; every crack of thunder and creak of construction had heralded another attack.  They had been sure, so sure, that any moment they would be torn apart.

They had gotten… better.  Slowly.  But once your world had been shattered, you could never really regain the person you had been before.

Pietro had never considered it, but having her lab torn apart and her mind invaded by a megalomaniac robot probably hadn’t been something Helen shook off easily.  Nearly being killed couldn’t have helped.

“Doctor Cho,” he said again, as another explosion shook the room. Helen blinked, expression shifting from unbridled terror to a more restrained variant.

“We’re under attack,” she said, reaching for her keycard and unlocking the door.  “We should-“

“I’ve got this,” he said, and was out the door before she could respond.

Time slowed for Pietro.

In the beginning, as the experiments changed his body and his mind to match, time seemed to have been slowed to a crawl permanently.  A day had seemed to take weeks to pass, the simple task of holding a conversation was an agony of waiting, for slow, weighted lips to fumble for distorted, guttural words.  He was so fast it seemed he existed on another plane of reality, apart from everyone else, even Wanda.   She was lost in her own way; instead of disconnected from the world, she was overexposed, crumbling under the weight of the countless presences, countless thoughts, an overwhelming barrage of information that never let up.  He had sensed her presence then only in flashes.

But it had been Wanda who had helped him regain some sense of normalcy in the way he interacted with the world.

Once she had gained a measure of control, she had reached out to him, seeking the solace of a familiar mind amidst the chaos. 

It was as if something had been missing from his life until that moment.  They had always been close, more than close, but this was… something else.  At first her thoughts had seemed so slow to him, and his fast to her, but nothing could keep them from communication for long.  Through Wanda’s thoughts, he had gained a grasp on how time passed for her, and managed to force him own mindset into something similar by default.

It was an imperfect process, and even at its best things had still seemed to happen slower than they had before.   But with her gone, without that reference, it was… harder.  More and more, time seemed to crawl.

But now, time seemed to slow around him as he ran towards the source of the explosion.   There was no stampede of panicked scientists- Helen didn’t seem to keep enough staff on hand for that to be a problem- but those who were there were doing a credible impression of a stampede, at least.  Pietro zoomed past them, dodging around each obstacle at breakneck speed.

He rounded a corner, and came face to face with Iron Man.

No, not Iron Man, he realized as he circled the suit of armor.  It was just like those he had seen attacking Wanda- unpainted, gunmetal gray, shoddily put together, with pieces that did not fit perfectly together and exposed wiring poking out from joints. 

Something further down was on fire, and smoke was beginning to creep through the hallway.

Somewhere, someone began to scream.  The wail was stretched to a guttural moan by Pietro’s heightened perceptions, by the seeming slowing of time.

There corridor further down had been blown upon, and more of badly-armored figures were clambering through the hole.  They were wielding garden-variety automatic weapons, instead of the poorly-functioning imitations of Stark’s weapons technology that some of the suits who had attacked his sister had been trying to use.  These people had learned from that attack, then, or were more pragmatic to begin with.

Not pragmatic enough not to use badly built technology.

The armored figures loomed through the smoke, their illuminated eyes glowing eerily, the creak of their metal joints a cacophony that drown out all other sound.

It could have been an intimidating sight.  It was an image straight out of Pietro’s nightmares; Tony Stark’s creations, coming to kill him. 

Pietro smiled. 

Not even Iron Man could keep up with him; what chance did these clumsy imitations?

He strode past the one he had been examining, and reached out casually to snag the exposed wiring at the back of the suit’s neck.  He snapped it.

The light in the suits eyes began to fade as Pietro faced its brethren.

 

* * *

 

The streets of Sokovia were in chaos.

Tumult was the natural state of what remained of Sokovia.  A massive city’s worth of refugees crammed into the edges of the city that remained after the attack was enough to create conflict in even the most ordered of societies; throw in generations of oppression and exploitation, and a series of increasingly totalitarian dictators, along with a seemingly impossible event that had literally uprooted the country and blown it to pieces, and Clint was surprised that Sokovia wasn’t in worse shape.

Not that he was counting his blessings at that moment. 

Word of the attack on the cemetery had spread quickly, and panic had followed quickly on its heels.  Was this another legion of robots, coming to destroy the remains of the country?  Had one of Sokovia’s perpetually territory-hungry neighbors finally taken advantage of the country’s weakened state to snap it up?  Clint caught snatches of dozens of similar theories as he dodged past groups of frantic refugees.

If he had been Captain America, or Thor, or hell, even Iron Man, he would have tried to restore some order, stood up and told the people that the attackers had been dealt with, that they were safe.  But no one was safe in Sokovia, and as far as Clint knew, another drove of Stark rip-offs could come streaming down from the sky at any second.  And he wasn’t really a man for speeches to the masses anyway; he fulfilled his missions, he beat the odds and saved the world, and he returned home to his wife and kids, completely content in the fact that no one but his bosses and would ever know the extent of what he had done.

Plus, he had an unresponsive Wanda Maximoff to worry about.

It wasn’t difficult to carry her; he had been forced to haul around Tony and Banner on separate occasions before, bridal-style, and next to them she weighed almost nothing.  It shouldn’t have been surprising, since the kid probably hadn’t been getting three square meals a day for most of her life.  But it was easy to forget that- and to forget how _young_ she was- when she was awake, especially when that eerie red glow lit her eyes.

But now those eyes were closed, and she was still and silent in his arms.  He hurried through the streets, forcing his way through the crowds and trying to keep his eyes on the warehouse that had become the Avengers’ relief efforts’ base of operations.  There, the quinjet that had flown them to Sokovia  was waiting.

Rumbles were beginning the run through the crowd around Clint.  In the distance, someone had taken up a chant.  Other voices were screaming.  The wail of baby rose over the ruckus for an instant, and was drown out by the screech of a siren.

Something prickled the back of his neck, an instinct born from years of covert work.  Someone was following him.  A surreptitious glance told him nothing; no figure stood out from the throngs.  He gritted his teeth and pressed on, hoping that he could get to the quinjet before whoever it was made their move, before he was forced to start another fight in the midst of the rising hysteria.  People would panic, and a lot would die.

Voices rose to shouting.

Everyone was afraid.  Nobody knew what was going on.  These people had been wrenched from their homes, narrowly escaped death, subjected to water shortages and food shortages and the small mercy of foreign aid, and they had been living in a state of terror for months.  Now they had been attacked, again.

The situation was like a field of brittle hay dosed in gasoline, and at any moment the sparks of tension in the air would catch and set the whole thing ablaze.

Clint had already done all he could for Sokovia that day; he just wanted to protect Wanda and escape.

He dodged into an alley to avoid a mass of shouting people in the road ahead of him, but came face to face with the edge of the enormous crater Ultron had created.  Turning back, he returned to the road just as something exploded.

Chips of masonry and concrete became deadly projectiles as they were hurled through the air by the force of the blast.  Clint turned away, hunching over Wanda to protect her.  The blast originated a couple hundred feet from them, and the brunt of the impact was absorbed by the crowds closest to it.  A few shards of stone glanced harmlessly off of Clint’s armored coat. 

Smoke was billowing up through the air, though no fire was billowing from where the bomb or grenade or whatever it had been had been set off.  The smoke was blowing in from the opposite direction, and as soon as Clint felt the familiar sting in his eyes and the back of his throat, he knew what it was. 

He squinted and began running, away from the front of tear gas rolling down the road, fighting down a surge of panic of his own.  The situation was rapidly deteriorating to everything he had been trained to avoid.  He was as good as on his own, with the warehouse staffed with only a few ex-SHIELD agents with any field training- it was ostensibly a mission of peace, and the field agents who had been sent were mostly on missions within the city, hunting down any remaining traces of HYDRA and their operations. 

Clint cursed himself for not familiarizing himself with the city.  He had let his guard down, assumed that his only role in this trip would be emotional support.  For once, his paranoia had let him down.  He should have learned by now- when did anything ever go as planned when Avengers were involved?

The fleeing people were slowing, a mass coagulating around a pile of rubble partially blocking the path.  People were panicking, pushing against the slowing crowds, but that only served to slow it further, as they fell.

Clint glanced around desperately, looking for some way around the mass.

Someone grabbed his arm.  He spun around, ready to lash out at an assailant, to come face to face with a weary-looking young woman.

She stepped away from him, and lifted her hands to show they were empty.  She was clothed in a ragged coat, but it was hanging open, and he could see no visible weapons.

She said something, a mix of foreign syllables neither his ears nor his eyes could catch.

“Come with me,” she said, in Russian, and this time he understood.  Her voice pitched too low for him to hear over the cacophony, but he had a lifetimes’ practice in reading lips.  “Come with me,” she repeated again, this time in heavily-accented English.

He eyed her warily, and shot a glance at the tangled mass of people in front of them.  “Why?”

“I saw what you did,” the woman said, gesturing at Wanda.  “What she did.  I can shelter you from… this.” 

He didn’t remember her from the graveyard, but he had been too busy to catalogue every civilian.  A second glance at her told him what he had taken for smudges of dirt on her face was dried blood from a jagged cut on her forehead, as if she had been struck by a piece of low-velocity shrapnel, and her coat was torn in places.

She couldn’t have been much older than Wanda.  Another kid.  Not a particularly well-fed one either.  But that didn’t stop her from being a threat.  He had learned that lesson at Natasha’s hands, repeatedly.

The screaming was getting louder.  It would be all too easy for even a trained SHIELD assassin to get caught up in the chaos, especially when he was unarmed and carrying someone.  All the finesse in the world didn’t do much against sheer human panic.

“Alright,” he said, stepping towards her.

“Follow me,” she said, pushing through the crowd to the side of the street.  She slipped down a back alley, beckoning him along, and took off running.

Clint followed. 

* * *

 

There was an immense, visceral satisfaction in tearing things apart.

Each suit Pietro hamstrung, each wire or component he tore away as he raced around them brought the whole unit of armed men closer to collapse.  He couldn’t hear them talking to each other, but they must have had some sort of communication channel wired into the suits, and imagining their confusion brought a wicked grin to his face.

No doubt they had thought the labs would be an easy target, nothing more than a few dozen security guards to deal with.  Easy pickings.

Instead they were met with an unstoppable opponent they couldn’t even see.

His path was peppered with bursts of machine gun fire, but it was always seconds too late.  He could see the bullets, moving through the air as if it were molasses; laughably easy to avoid.

Easy, except when…

Something in the note of machine-gun chatter changed.   Pietro faltered.    

Suddenly he was somewhere else, standing in the ruins of Sokovia, and Wanda was screaming…

He felt like he should be in pain, but all he could feel was a strange tingling feeling rushing over him, echoes of what he couldn’t quite remember.

An impact slammed him back into reality. His shoulder was on fire, and when he reached up to touch it his fingers came away slick and red.  His head was spinning, and he just narrowly managed to dodge around another hail of gunfire.  His foot caught on a piece of debris, and Pietro slammed into the floor.

He scrambled over groggily, to come face to face with one of the armored figures looming over him.  Just as Pietro’s eyes met the glowing slits of the figure’s mask, a bolt of energy slammed into the armor, searing a hole the size of a fist in the armor and the person within.  Pietro got to his feet unsteadily as the figure crumpled, revealing Helen Cho.

The doctor was holding one of Tony Stark’s energy weapons in a white-knuckled grip, a look of fierce determination on her face.  Behind her, a second wave of security officers began to swarm in.

Pietro had done a number on the half-dozen attackers, and as soon as they noticed the changed odds, some consensus was made behind their helmets and the five still breathing turned tail and ran.

Pietro watched them go.  Now that he was standing still, the exhaustion that had been hidden underneath the constant adrenaline took hold, and it was all he could do to remain on his feet.  The wound on his shoulder had stopped bleeding, but it was sending aching, bone-deep flashes of pain through him as it began to heal.  His head was still fuzzy from… whatever that had been.

He didn’t remember dying.  That had bothered him a little, that a part of his memory was gone just like that, but…

That… fragment… didn’t seem like something he wanted to remember.

He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, letting the murmur of voices and wail of sirens wash over him.

* * *

 

The woman led Clint to a rundown apartment complex on the edge of town.  The route she took zig-zagged through alleyways and small backstreets, and they made it through the city quicker than Clint would have thought possible. 

“Come on,” she called again, stepping into the apartment building.

Clint’s reservations tumbled through his mind again, and then he glanced down at Wanda, mentally shrugged, and stepped into the building after the woman. 

He was fully prepared to meet an ambush.

Instead he was greeted with a fairly typical apartment building lobby, albeit one filled with refugees and strewn with clothes and possessions that made it obvious the city was utilizing every inch of viable housing space remaining.

A few of the Sokovians were calling out greeting to the woman, who was hovering by the door, waiting for Clint.  When he stepped in she took his arm, smiling at the other people in the lobby and chatting away in Sokovian. 

It didn’t serve to draw all of the attention away from Clint and Wanda- Clint was an obvious foreigner- but no one seemed to outright question the woman.  She steered Clint to a door that led to a set of stairs. 

  1. _Of course._   Clint prided himself in his stamina, but after piloting the long flight from Manhattan to Sokovia, fighting a legion of Iron Man wannabes, and trekking his way across half the city carrying Wanda he really had been hoping on an elevator.  Plus, less chance of an ambush.



He was on high alert as he followed the woman up the stairs, anticipating an attack at any moment.  But they made it up to the fourth floor of the apartment building without incident, and the woman led him to an apartment marked 402.

She unlocked the door, and held to open for Clint.

He shot her a glance.  “You first.”

She gave him a level stare, but stepped into the apartment. 

There were no armed men waiting to spring on Clint and Wanda when he stepped inside.  The apartment was as worn as the lobby, and barely large enough for  two people to navigate around comfortably, but everything was tidy.  The apartment door opened onto a small living room space, with a coach and an ancient-looking television.  A small kitchenette was shoved against the far wall, with a stove and refrigerator.  A door to the left side of room led to a bedroom, and another beside it to a bathroom.

“You can set her down on the bed,” the woman said as she too off her coat, jerking her head towards the bedroom. 

Clint nodded, and carried Wanda into the bedroom.  It was only slightly larger than a broom closet, and dominated by a double bed covered in a worn blue quilt. 

He set Wanda down on top of the covers.  She was shivering, and her skin was several shades paler than it normal, but she breathing normally, and when he pressed two fingers against the side of ner neck to find her pulse, it seemed to be normal.

He was at a loss as what to do- was she just exhausted from exercising her powers?  The handful of Enhanced SHIELD and the Avengers had encountered all seemed wildly different, and no one had done an in depth study of Wanda yet.  He had a feeling that wouldn’t be something she would be keen on.  But it left him with no reference for the toll her powers took on her body.   After the destruction of Sokovia, she had been in a state of near-catatonia for more than a week, but there was the emotional toll of losing her brother to add to that too.

“You’re an Avenger,” the woman’s voice snapped him out of his contemplation.  He glanced up. 

The woman was standing in the doorway.  She had shed her coat and washed her face, and he got his first proper look at her.  Without the oversized coat, she looked smaller; nothing more than skin and bones.  She had a pretty face, but the jagged cut on her forehead wouldn’t be the first scar on it.  Her hair was reddish blonde, and fell to just below her chin in a matted mess.  The hands she was clasping in front of her bore scars too.  Overall, he got the impression that she had been in her share of fights.

“Yes,” he said at last, meeting her gaze with a distrustful stare.  So far, his decision to follow her seemed to be the right one, but that could change at any moment.  “Thank you for your hospitality.” 

She smiled.  “I know what you did for Sokovia.  When… when the city was destroyed, and again today.”  Her gaze shifted to down to Wanda, and something changed in her expression.

She crossed the small space between the door and the bed with measured steps, and leaned over the bed.  Clint tensed, but she merely reached over and brushed Wanda’s hair back from her face, and stared.  And stared.

“Wanda Maximoff.”  After a long moment she straightened, and took a step back.  “I knew it,” she murmured.  “I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t, but…” 

“What?” Clint said, shifting himself to loom more protectively over Wanda.  “You know her?”  It seemed too much of a coincidence… but Sokovia wasn’t a terribly large country.

“Knew her,” the woman said, turning away from them.  “I… It seems like… so long ago, now.  Before… before all of this insanity.”   She laughed, but it was a bitter sound.  “I knew Wanda and… and her brother Pietro.  We were friends when were kids, before the bombings, and later we… ended up in the same political circles.”  The woman leaned against the bedroom wall and smiled.  “We were good at raising hell.”

Clint remembered Wanda’s file.  She and her brother had been activists, before being taken in by HYDRA.  “I see.”

“She’s one of you now,” the woman said.  “An Avenger.”

“She is,” Clint said, though it wasn’t a question.

She closed her eyes, and sighed.  “Crazy fucking world.  I guess… those men fulfilled their promises, at least.  I thought Wanda and Pietro were stupid for going with them.”  She shook her head.  “But… Wanda was always a good friend.  And she always wanted to be able to help people, to save people.”  She laughed, turning towards the door.  “You can stay as long as you want.  And oh- my name is Glynis, by the way.”

“Clint,” he said, and watching her leave.

Once she was gone, he pulled out his cellphone to call Natasha.

* * *

 

Wanda woke to familiarity.

She was warm, curled up in scratchy sheets.  When she opened her eyes, she saw a wall patterned in familiar, faded wallpaper.  How many times had she woken up in this bed before?  She remembered once, after a particularly brutal entanglement with the police that had led to several of their group being taken away and never heard from again, Pietro had carried her back here.  She had been bleeding; she had felt bad to bleed all over Glynis and Ilya’s home. 

They were lucky; they had a home, an actual constant home, even if it was just a tiny run-down apartment at the very edge of the city. 

It was only because of that guaranteed shelter that Wanda and Pietro had managed to survive some of the harsher winters.

Wanda snuggled down under the covers, tempted to let herself drift back to sleep.  She was exhausted, and so warm, so comfortable.  Moments like this were few and far between. 

Something stopped her from sleeping.  It was a strange feeling, like fear, and like grief, but far away.  Too far away to disrupt her in her bubble of exhausted contentment.

But she was in Glynis and Ilya’s bed, and worse, she didn’t even remember how she got there.  The protest must have gone awry, worse than usual…

“Pietro?” she called.  When her brother wasn’t immediately at her side, she knew something was wrong.  “Glynis?  Illya?”  she called louder, sitting up.

“Wanda?” a gruff voice said from beside her.

The bubble burst, and thoughts came crashing down on her.

The man beside her was worried.  He was thinking about _WandaLauraNatasha chewed out my ass for not expecting something what if I don’t come home one day has she screwed up her mind?_  Little clouds of irritation and self-doubt were breaking over him, overlaying the weariness buried deep under everything else.

There was a woman in the next room.  Her mind was full of flashes of Wanda and Pietro and Illya and _oh god why did I let him go did the Avengers I’ve never seen anything like that before actual magic?_  Her thoughts were a maelstrom that threatened to pull Wanda under, and she tried to tear herself away.

There were dozens, hundreds of others in the building.  She tried to draw herself away from them, but only served to expose herself to more.  The deep fear and sorrow that had felt so far away only moments ago crashed over her, countless fragments of the loss, the destruction of her city, her country, played over and over again in hundreds of minds.

_I knew I had to leave I don’t she wouldn’t believe me haven’t seen him since one minute she was there and then the endless abyss I always wanted to fly but Iron Man saved dead for sure how could this happen I’m just glad to lucky my apartment wasn’t I just want things back to can’t forget I’m so afraid…_

Wave after wave of thoughts pressed down on her, crushing her under the weight of their amounts, their presences.

She was barely aware that she was sobbing, hands pressed against her ears as if that would block it out.  It was her fault, all of this was her fault, each and every barb of misery and sadness and-

It was Pietro’s voice, cutting through the others, her brother who was always there for her.  It was the voice of one of Stryker’s innumerable scientists and psychologists, the training she had received at their hands.  It was her own voice.

Underneath her fingertips, her face was slick with sweat.  She was warm.  She could feel the scratchiness of the sheets against her legs.  There was a weight on her shoulder, someone’s hand.  She was tired.  Her body hurt, and she could feel little stings of pain from dozens of bruises and cuts.

She was in Glynis and Ilya’s apartment.  She didn’t know how she got there.  She had fought people in suits similar to Tony Stark’s.  She had come to Sokovia in a SHIELD quinnjet, piloted by Clint Barton.

Her name was Wanda Maximoff.  She was nineteen.  Her brother Pietro was dead.  She was an Avenger.

“Wanda?”

“Clint,” Wanda said, taking another shaky and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, leaving smears of eyeliner on her fingers.  She had almost gotten her breathing back under control, and she had blocked off his thoughts again.  And all the others, aside from the persistent hum of chatter in the background of her mind that she could never completely silence.  “I…  I’m sorry.”

He took his hand from her shoulder quickly, and she immediately missed the contact. 

It was… strange to see Clint here, in this room that belonged in the past.

He was sitting beside the bed, in the rickety wooden chair that she had so often occupied.  It looked fragile and strange against the starkness of his physique and militaristic clothes. 

There had been her life before her powers had been awoken, and her life after.  The two had never mixed, weren’t supposed to mix.  The only person who had been with her through it all had been Pietro. 

“I… I forgot,” she said.  “I… my powers were… exhausted I guess and I just assumed that everything was… back the way it was.  Before.”  Tears were coming to her eyes again, but she blinked them away.  She was so tired of crying.

Clint’s hand was on her shoulder again.  “It’ll be alright,” he said, and then leaned over and tentatively pulled her into a hug.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you notice any names you recognize from the comics there's a 95% chance you're right. I'm pilfering some characters connected to Wanda or Pietro and making them a bit more MCU-like for the purposes of the fic. I hope I'm not butchering anyone's faves; I have plans to have them become closer to their comic book counterparts eventually.  
> If anyone wants to come and flail with me about the Maximoff twins or anything in general or has a burning desire to see pictures of my cat or my face come chill with me over at corvidfeathers.tumblr.com


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